Steps on the Path – Pratyahara

No, that’s not a typo. I mean that Mother Earth is waking up after a long winter – stretching, and yawning – announcing her presence with birds, and green sprouts and warm sun and soft breezes. It’s life reasserting itself with all the bells and whistles, and it captivates all my attention.

Sight and sound, taste, smell and touch – the five senses. We need them to warn us of danger and we delight in the enjoyment they bring. And while it’s certainly important to know when we’re in the path of an oncoming car, how can we ever measure the value in the beauty of a sunset, or the music of our child’s first words.

The senses can get overwhelmed.

Too much, too many, too loud…and pleasure shifts into stress, pain and discomfort. We tune out and shut down for protection. When I worked in Manhattan I rode the subways. Just getting to work was like running the gauntlet – the noise, the smell, the crowds. It was freezing in the winter, sweltering in summer. No wonder city people get cranky.

In writing about the path of yoga, the sage Pantanjali leads us from a foundation of basic ethics (yamas and niyamas), to conscious movement (asana), and mindful breathing(pranayama). This next step – pratyahara- represents a critical shift. Rolf Gates writes that it is “the juncture at which we go from distraction to direction”, that “it is the choice to release our grip on the external world and all our attempts to control it, in order to focus our minds entirely on the internal.” We move closer to the consciousness of meditation.

Translated as “in the direction of food,” pratyahara is more about refining than it is about abstaining. The preparation of body and mind in the earlier steps leads effortlessly to a turning inward of attention. We are drawn to seek those things which are unchanging in a impermanent and sometimes chaotic world.

There is a small weeping cherry tree in front of my house. It is in full blossom now, a state that seems to last only a day or two. I enjoy it fully, and so do the bees. Alistair Shearer writes in his commentary on the Yoga Sutras:

“The mind is always drawn to something that will give it greater satisfaction; it is like a bee that, seeking nectar, moves from one flower to the next. ..Like the mind, the senses are charmed by whatever they find most pleasing. It is precisely this orientation that leads them to follow the mind inward in meditation. There is no suggestion here of abstinence from sensory pleasures. On the contrary, the more the senses are refined, the greater the riches they reveal. Pratyahara is the cleansing of the doors of perception.”